Think Jan Karon's Mitford — with mobsters

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Over the weekend, I finally did something that’s been on the list for a while and moved my site over to JennieCoughlin.com. After enough messing with DNS and other geeky details to remind me why I like the content side of being a digital editor, not the production side, it’s up and running — and redesigned.

Everything that was here is now over there, but so far everybody has said the new site is MUCH easier to navigate. If you get a chance, head on over, check it out and let me know what you think!

Last week I was making the rounds wearing my Author Jennie hat in both Massachusetts and Virginia, and I spoke to a lot of people about Rory’s Story Cubes and the Story Cubes Challenge. So now it’s time for Round 4 of the challenge. Like Round 3, this one involves three cubes each from the original set, Actions and Voyages.

If you’re new to the challenge, here’s the scoop: I post a photo of nine Story Cubes on Wednesday morning. You write a story using all nine cubes. If you want to post a link (or the story itself) in comments, go for it! If you’d rather keep it to yourself, that’s fine, too. Teachers and librarians, I’ve done some workshops recently on writing using the cubes, and if you’re close enough for me to get to, I’m happy to do something for your facility. Just email me and we can talk details.

Jason Collins’ announcement today in Sports Illustrated — the first active male pro athlete in one of the major US leagues to come out of the closet — is historic. It also highlights an interesting challenge I had when I was first developing Exeter and the characters — specifically, Dan Reilly.

If you’ve read any of the books, you know Dan is gay. He also was a football player, and in the mid-1990s, he was both openly gay and playing high school football. Dan’s just a year or so older than Jason Collins. Massachusetts is a fairly progressive state, but that’s so unusual as to be implausible, at least on the face of it. Frankly, if I’d consciously built the character that way… Well, I probably wouldn’t have.

The original story I was trying to tell in what was supposed to be the first book had Dan as a main character, but not THE main character. Ellie was the main character, and at the time it takes place, she’s just moved to Exeter and ended a longtime relationship. I didn’t want readers thinking she and Dan were going to get together. And I read enough fanfiction to know that it often doesn’t matter what the author intends — readers will have their own opinions about character pairings. So I started thinking about the characters and my options.

I knew a lot about Dan at that point, but not his family. (Liz was not yet his cousin — she wasn’t even a townie.) Realistically, there were two options for putting him off-limits. He had to be happily married. Or he had to be gay. (As it turned out, he was both.) I first thought married. But I knew Dan well enough at that point to know that if he was married to a woman, he’d have a few kids by now. And I knew that wasn’t right. So I wondered if he was gay. It took about 30 seconds for me to realize that was the case — it was the missing piece that made the character come alive. Chris came to life later.

But that left me with an interesting dilemma, because I already had the football background in there. I knew enough about his personality to know that hiding something that big wasn’t in character. So then I had to figure out what would make a high school football player come out and play football — and make pretty much everybody else accept that. There’s been some commentary — and Collins himself alluded to it in his essay — making the point that Collins can come out in part because he is such a tough, ferocious player. He defies any stereotype. How does a high school kid get that rep? How did Dan earn enough respect that he could have plausibly done this?

I also knew at this point that the Irish mob was in Exeter. That ended up being the answer. Dan had taken on the mob and won — he’d earned respect from enough people that he wasn’t going to lose it by coming out. Today, a young, gay football player doesn’t need such an extreme situation. But this was in the early 1990s, more than 20 years ago. It had to be an extraordinary set of circumstances. The marsh mess also ended up explaining a great deal more about several other characters, things I hadn’t fully grappled with at that point.

Dan only exists in my head. Jason Collins is the man who actually took this step to come out while playing. I’m hoping what he sees going forward is as positive as the initial reactions. The fact that it took until 2013 for any male pro athlete in a major sport to do so, though, reminds me of why a fictional character had to face down the Irish mob to do something similar in 1991.

As you’ve no doubt guessed, the craziness of the past few weeks has wreaked havoc on my schedule. So while Dan and Chris’ story still is coming, it’s not coming April 29. Breaking news, a generally high level of work insanity and a nasty cold have all combined to throw my writing schedule completely off track. I’m hoping to have an update by mid-week with a new release date.

It’s been so busy, in fact, that I never formally announced the latest Exeter release, the ebook-only “We Are Exeter.” It’s a collection of short profiles of all the characters, drawn from the pages of the Exeter Ledger. (That means, of course, no profile of Exeter Ledger editor CJ Jenkins. But he’s got a few comments at the beginning. If you like reading tea leaves, you might get some clues about future Exeter stories from him.)

A few of the profiles have been posted here at various points in the Exeter Ledger section of the site, but most are new to this book. You’ll learn more about characters you’ve met and discover some characters that haven’t yet appeared in the books.

If you’ve read it, please let me know which character you most enjoyed reading about, and which one you would love to know more about (if you had to pick just one).

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Now available: All That Is Necessary

“Believable characters, an intricate plot, an absence of fluff, a thread of social justice, and the anticipation of more plot twists to come, All That Is Necessary will challenge you to keep up, and you’ll keep turning the pages to do just that.” — Phyllis Anne Duncan, author of Spy Flash, Blood Vengeance and Fences

Upcoming Exeter Releases

The next Exeter ebook will be out March 31. Stay tuned for more details about it. For now, you can watch the progress:
In April, find out how Dan and Chris met.

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